5 Lean, Mean Profit Machines

These companies squeeze plenty of profits from their workers

Google

Employees: 20,164Profit Per Employee: $214,768

Where to start with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)? Basically anywhere, as the company has hit it out of the park since its founding in 1996 by Stanford University classmates Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who’s first crack at a search engine (initially called BackRub) used links to determine the importance of individual webpages.

That was roughly $37 billion in revenue and a market cap of $247 billion ago, and the success of the Google search engine is one of the great inventions of the modern era, plain and simple. Google’s Android system helps to run the mobile world, and the stock recently passed the $700 per share level. It’s safe to say Google is getting plenty of bang from its brilliant minds.

Google also is the largest employer on this list, but one of the most efficient — Google does little on the actual manufacturing side of things, and requires relatively little overhead for its big-money operation.